22 Oct 2015 Oracle BI Cloud Service, Part IV: Creating analyses, reports and dashboards

In Parts II and III of the BICS series, we covered how to upload data to the cloud and build the repository. In this post, we will be covering the basics of analyses, reports, and dashboards in the BI Cloud Service. The OBI Cloud Service has almost the same report capabilities of OBIEE. You can create analyses combining different views and dashboards, limit the results using filters, prompt for values and create dynamic reports using named and inline actions just as you would do in the on-premise version of OBI.

Figure 1: Creating reports, visualizations and dashboards from the Oracle BI Cloud Service & Data Discovery Webinar from Oracle Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG

All the results of analyses can be exported to the usual formats such as Excel or PDF, and you can also make use of variables: session, repository, presentation, request, and the recently added global variables are supported. There is the possibility to report against a mash-up of model data and external sources in the PROD environment. A new presentation feature recently added to the BI Cloud Service (and that will be available in the on-premise version 12c of OBIEE) is Visual Analyzer, a web-based tool accessible from the BICS homepage that allows you to explore analytics data visually and on an individual basis in just a few clicks.

Figure 2: Accessing the Visual Analyzer tool from blog Sixty-Analytics

Visual Analyzer simplifies the process of finding the right information and creating rich and powerful visualizations with that data. You can search the entire repository for dimension and measure attributes and drag and drop them to build graphs and charts in a Tableau-type single pane, allowing you to find correlations, discover patterns, and see trends in your content.

Figure 3: Creating reports in Visual Analyzer from Oracle

Figure 4: Creating compound visualizations in Visual Analyzer from Oracle

On the downside, there are still some presentation services lacking in the cloud version of OBI. Scorecards, a useful view for KPIs in OBIEE, are still not supported in the cloud version. Agents, alerts and BI Publisher are also not presently supported, although we will probably see these services supported in future releases within the next 12 months. Be sure to check out the last part of our BICS post series explaining how the service is managed and our overall conclusion.